This Side of Silence is an anthropological examination of the tension involved in attempts to recognize torture, and the implications that this has for the types of perpetrator that can be held accountable and particular survivors that can be protected.

This Side of SilenceHuman Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty

In late April 2002 Binyam Mohamed was turned over to the US authorities after being arrested by Pakistani police at Karachi Airport. Mohamed was born in Ethiopia but in the mid-1990s had claimed asylum in the United Kingdom. He had converted to Islam in 2001, and later the same year traveled to Afghanistan and then Pakistan. Following Mohamed's detention in Pakistan, he was interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and flown to Morocco, where he was imprisoned for eighteen months. Mohamed was then sent to a detention center run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Afghanistan, and finally, in September 2004, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay. The US military alleged that Mohamed had been trained in Kabul to make ''dirty bombs'' and was planning to carry out an attack on US soil. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he was released and returned to the United Kingdom in early 2009.

While Mohamed was in Guantanamo Bay, he made allegations that he had been tortured when he was in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan. A US court later ruled that Mohamed's ''trauma lasted for 2 long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one foreign prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time.''1 Back in the United Kingdom, Mohamed's lawyers filed a petition in the courts demanding that the Foreign Office turn over all the evidence they had about his abuse. In the summer of 2008, English judges ruled that any documents held by British authorities should be given to Mohamed's lawyers but not made public, on the grounds that their full disclosure could harm the intelligence relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. The judges also found that British agents had ''facilitated'' Mohamed's interviews by the Pakistani and American security services.2 Two years later, English Appeal Court judges ruled that if it ''had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom,'' the treatment inflicted on Mohamed by US officials ''would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom.''3 They also ruled that all evidence about Mohamed's ill-treatment must be released.4

Alan Johnson, the British home secretary at the time, responded to the judicial rulings and newspaper headlines that followed by saying that allegations of British complicity in torture were a ''gross and offensive misrepresentation of the truth'' (Naughton and O'Neil 2010). The Metropolitan Police Service, however, announced that it was launching a criminal investigation into the involvement of the British security services in Mohamed's ill-treatment. In addition, Mohamed's lawyers launched a claim for civil damages, suing the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and the Attorney General, as well as MI6 and MI5, for their complicity in his unlawful detention and ill-treatment. In 2010, the newly elected Conservative-Liberal coalition government declared that once criminal and civil proceedings had come to an end, it would launch a judicial inquiry to ''look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11.''5 By the autumn of the same year, Kenneth Clarke, the new minister of justice, told parliament that an out-of-court settlement had been reached. He argued that if the case had continued, ''Our reputation as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law . . . risks being tarnished.''6 Clarke added that no admission of liability had been made and that the details of the settlement were to remain confidential. The following day, the director of public prosecutions announced that the MI5 officer investigated for complicity with Mohamed's ill-treatment in Pakistan and Morocco would not be prosecuted.

Since 2001, images of tortured bodies and the claims and counterclaims they generate have shaped much international politics. Binyam Mohamed's case was just one among many. Probably the most infamous incident involved the release of pictures of American troops mistreating Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. After the release of these photographs, there were further revelations about ill-treatment by the US military in Guantanamo and Bagram, as well as the use of secret detention centers and ''extraordinary rendition'' to places where torture was, in effect, outsourced. In the United Kingdom, the photographs from Abu Ghraib have also been overlaid by several subsequent events. Six months after the invasion of Iraq, British soldiers used stress positions and beatingson Iraqi detainees, resulting in the death of one man and the hospitalization of others. A few years later, photographs were released showing British soldiers forcing Iraqi detainees to simulate oral and anal sex. In another story, which was later revealed to be a hoax, a British newspaper published photographs apparently showing soldiers carrying out mock executions of Iraqi detainees.7 As well as the claims made by Binyam Mohamed, other allegations were made about the complicity of MI5 and MI6 in torture carried out by Pakistan and Egypt, among other countries. Further controversies arose over the use of British airspace in the ''extraordinary rendition'' of detainees to places outside the protection of the law. The list of examples could go on.

Torture is a word with immense ethical, political, and cultural power, seeming to encompass all that is wrong with arbitrary and excessive power. It has become seen as close to the very worst thing that can happen to someone or that one person can do to another. One respected commentator has even argued that it is worse than all forms of killing (Shue 2004). Many people would concur. Some may disagree over the definition of torture, but in doing so they are not challenging the privileged status of torture as a form of suffering and cruelty above nearly all others. To be sure, the moral objection to torture is not universal. However, torture is still not something that many people will openly admit to doing. Perpetrators will dress up their acts in euphemisms, deny that what they have done counts as torture, or dance around the edge of definitional debates. Torture remains beyond the pale, in words if not in deeds. It is not a term that is going to be given a positive spin any time soon. Even those who would condone the use of torture in very specific circumstances say they do so with heavy hearts (see, for example, Elshtain 2004). From this perspective, torture is still very wrong but just not quite as wrong as other things.

Current debates about torture are saturated with law. In the United States, lawyers were involved in writing memos that justified nearly every aspect of military and CIA interrogation programs. Since the memos were made public, there have been numerous court cases concerning the treatment of detainees. In the United Kingdom, the meanings and implications of torture have been thrashed out in a number of legal and quasi-legal forums. The extensive litigation around Binyam Mohamed was just one of several cases. Conflicts have ranged over the protections owed to torture survivors, the responsibilities of those complicit in the perpetration of torture, and the United Kingdom's international human rights obligations. These disputes have taken place in court-martials, judicial inquiries, immigration cases, reports before UN monitoring mechanisms, appearances before the European Court of Human Rights, and in domestic civil litigation, among others. Legal forums have entered deep into the political arena, as judges have been asked to adjudicate on some of the most contentious contemporary concerns. Not only have judges become heavily politicized in this process, but politics has become judicialized.